Sample Chapter

Chapter One

INTERIOR DESIGN FOR INTERIOR STATES

Architecture, Ambience, and Affect

It was not uncommon, in my interviews with casino slot floor managers,
to hear of machine gamblers so absorbed in play that they were oblivious
to rising flood waters at their feet or smoke and fire alarms that blared at
deafening levels. As the casino surveillance tapes showed, the activity can
keep a group of gamblers unaware of their immediate surroundings, each
other, and even a dying man at their feet. Mollie witnessed this extreme of
unawareness one night as she searched the aisles of a casino for a machine
to play and came upon a small crowd gathered around a man lying on the
floor between a row of machines. "He'd had a heart attack and the paramedics
were getting him with those shocker things," she recalled. "Everyone
walking by was looking at him, but I was watching the woman on the
dollar slot machine. She was staring right at the screen and never missed a
beat. She played right through it, she never stopped." As the medical technicians
applied the defibrillator to start a stopped heart beating, the gambler
played the slot machine to keep a different kind of beat going, one that
held her in a zone removed from the sights, sounds, and events transpiring
around her. "You aren't really there," Mollie told us earlier of the zone,
"you're with the machine and that's all you're with."

Daniel, a retired telecommunications engineer, drew a direct link between
the removal he feels from his environment while in the zone and
design features of that very environment:

It starts while I'm on my way to the casino. I'm in the car driving, but in my
mind I'm already inside, walking around to find my machine. In the parking
lot, the feeling gets even stronger. By the time I get inside, I'm halfway into
that zone. It has everything to do with the sounds, the lights, the atmosphere,
walking through the aisles. Then when I'm finally sitting in front of
the machine playing, it's like I'm not even really there anymore—everything
fades away.

In Daniel's experience, the zone he enters is in some way a function of the
same architectural and ambient world that "fades away" within it. Taking
his insight as a point of departure, this chapter explores the relationship
between the interior design of the casino and the interior state of the
zone.

Relearning from Las Vegas

In their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, architects Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour made a case for the cultural
significance of Las Vegas and its built environment, arguing that the city
was a laboratory for experimentation with refreshingly populist architectural
forms. Rejecting the elitist notion that architecture's role was to
instill social values and behavioral ideals, the authors embraced the city's
roadside structures as spontaneous monuments to popular vernacular
and frontier automobile freedom. These structures, they proposed in
their landmark work, departed from the utopian, totalizing pretensions
of modernist architecture and expressed a democratically inclusive response
to "common values" and "existing conditions."

While modernist buildings sought to facilitate communitas through
high ceilings, wide open space, bountiful lighting and windows, and a
minimalist, uncluttered aesthetic, casinos' low, immersive interiors, blurry
spatial boundaries, and mazes of alcoves accommodated "crowds of anonymous
individuals without explicit connection with each other." Like
other popular communal spaces, casinos catered to the desires of everyday
Americans to be "together and yet separate." Venturi and his colleagues
elaborated: "The combination of darkness and enclosure of the
gambling room and its subspaces makes for privacy, protection, concentration
and control. The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects
with the outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant
in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when it is." Such
spaces did not pretend to remedy the social ills of the "lonely crowd," as
sociologist David Riesman had despairingly designated the public at
large, but instead responded to the escapist sensibilities of the American
populace by satisfying them, without judgment.

The publication of Learning from Las Vegas coincided with Nevada's
passage of the Corporate Gaming Act and the new wave of casino development
that it ushered in. This wave gathered momentum in the 1990s,
set off by the staggering success of the Mirage, a rainforest-themed resort
financed with junk bonds in 1989 by an ambitious young casino tycoon
named Steve Wynn. His winning venture inspired other companies to
build competing properties on the Strip, turning the idiosyncratic structures
that Venturi and his colleagues had lauded into gargantuan corporate
megaresorts—"total environments" whose meticulous architectural
calculations left little to chance. Behind whatever fanciful thematic facades
these new casinos bore—Polynesian rainforest, ancient Egypt, Italian
lakeside—their interior design followed a standard blueprint for revenue
maximization, offering a different kind of "learning from Las
Vegas." As Frederic Jameson suggested in his 1991 critique of Learning
from Las Vegas, its authors' eagerness to dismiss modernism had blinded
them to the "cultural logic of late capitalism" nascent in the architectural
forms they encountered. Although the aspirations of these forms were
not modernist in that they were neither moral nor civic, they were nonetheless
unabashedly instrumental; in place of self-mastery and social harmony,
they promoted self-abandon and corporate profit.

Now, as then, casinos' "commercial vernacular style" responds to popular
needs or desires for escapism as part of a larger effort to guide those
needs and desires. "The one thing you need to know about casino planning
is that the whole point of a casino is to get people walking from the
registration to the main body of the casino," responded a top designer
when asked by a scholar how the concept of "human engineering" influenced
casino design. He went on to explain what his firm meant by
"experience-based" architecture: "We try to influence movement and the
circulation pattern and therefore direct people's experience." Although
Wynn has downplayed the role of such strategy in the design of his own
casinos, stating that the winning formula behind the Mirage was the result
of "confusion, not cunning," in fact each of his properties has been a
fastidiously planned affair from conception to finish, from wall treatments
to ambient soundtrack. For instance, after he drew up floor plans for the
Mirage (see fig 1.1) he delayed construction so as to entertain suggestions
for alterations by the design consultant and former casino manager Bill
Friedman, whose pragmatic philosophy of casino design we will examine
in the following pages.

Friedman, the gambling industry's maverick guru of casino design, established
himself as such in 1974 when he wrote the definitive book on
casino management. Over the next twenty-five years, he conducted research
for another book, the epic 630-page tome boldly titled Designing
Casinos to Dominate the Competition, published in 2000. There he calls
casinos mazes, and makes sure his clients know what he means by this:
"The term maze is appropriate because my trusty American Heritage
Dictionary says it comes from the words to confuse or to confound and
defines it as `an intricate, usually confusing network of interconnecting
pathways, as in garden; a labyrinth.'" Unlike Wynn, Friedman invokes
confusion not to diminish the cunning of his own design but rather to
characterize it. The architectural vision of confusion that he elaborates
strongly resembles the "intricate maze" described in Learning from Las
Vegas yet shares less with postmodern populism than with applied behaviorism.
"Just as the Pied Piper of Hamelin lured all the rats and the
children to follow him," he writes, "a properly designed maze entices
adult players."

Although Friedman's maze is not the only casino design template influential
in the gambling industry today, the pride of place it accords machines
makes it a fitting port of entry for an analysis of the relationship between
interior design and machine gamblers' interior states. The maze and
its enticement strategies expressly seek to precipitate and modulate the
otherworldly "zone" of machine gambling.

Designing the Maze

In his writings, Friedman reproaches "casino owners and operators, architects,
interior designers, and decorators" for tending to rely on subjective
preferences and lofty design concepts rather than on a pragmatic
understanding of what encourages or deters gambling. "Their concepts
and proposals," he writes, "fail to recognize the unique objectives and
behavior of gamblers." His own expertise at recognizing such objectives
and behavior rests not only on the exhaustive empirical field studies he
conducted in eighty casinos over a period of twenty years (supplemented
by a historical analysis from 1931 to the present) but also on his experience
as a onetime slot machine addict. He thus establishes himself as an
authority in the book's introduction: "I understand the motives and experiences
of players because I was a degenerate gambler until I swore off it
twenty-five years ago."

Drawing on his intimate familiarity with the zone of machine gambling,
Friedman goes on to describe the play that gamblers seek as an
"inward focus into their own private domain [that] makes them oblivious
to everything around them." He insists that "the designer, marketer,
and operator who best caters to this personal, introspective experience
will attract and hold the most business." Friedman's insistence that casino
design cater to the escapist sensibilities of his clientele resonates with that
of Venturi and his colleagues, yet his aim is neither to decry modernist
pretension nor simply to accommodate the inclinations of his clients, but
rather to shape an environment that can steer their behavior in accordance
with the extractive aims of the larger operation.

In line with the economic priorities of his industry, Friedman pays
nearly exclusive attention to machine gamblers. While many interior designers
treat slot machines as mere props with which to lure people into
casinos, he conceives of the entire built environment of the casino as a
means for luring people to machines. "If the only commonality among
casinos is that they feature gambling equipment," he writes, "then it is an
eloquent statement by players that this is all that is important to them."
Acknowledging that his approach violates the sensibilities of professional
decorators, he insists that monotonous surroundings are best: "Machines
should not be hidden or camouflaged by attention grabbing décor, which
should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible so as to allow the
equipment to announce itself." As a like-minded casino operator put
it bluntly in the course of a 2009 panel on casino design, "I don't want
anyone to come in and look at the ceiling—I don't make any money on
the ceiling." Instead of turning attention away from machines, every
aspect of the environment should work to turn attention toward machines,
and keep it focused there. From ceiling height to carpet pattern, lighting
intensity to aisle width, acoustics to temperature regulation—all such elements,
Freidman argues, should be engineered to facilitate the interior
state of the machine zone. To this end he presents a comprehensive design
strategy involving thirteen trademarked laws called the Friedman Casino
Design Principles.

Shrinking Space: Construction, Segmentation, Shelter

The chief task of casino design, according to Friedman, is to arrange "the
spatial relationships of surrounding areas, the shape and feel of the structural
box that encloses the setting" in such a way as to encourage machine
gamblers' entry into "secluded, private playing worlds." "While players
prefer gambling in bustling casinos," he notes, "they want to be isolated
in their own private, intimate world from the surrounding hubbub that
attracted them in the first place." In response to this wish for isolation,
he applies The Law of Space Elimination to architectural layout.

Echoing the antimodernism of Learning from Las Vegas, Friedman accuses
mainstream designers of too readily assuming that a sense of space
is something to foster in patrons. "As an abstraction, spaciousness sounds
great. The term conjures up a sense of privacy and protection of one's
territory from infringement by others. It seems to offer freedom, even independence,
to move about at will, and it has a quality of affluence." Yet
his empirical research—in which he tracked properties' "foot traffic flow
patterns" and "equipment occupancy rates" and timed the duration of
prospective patrons' stays—has consistently found that the best performing
slots are those located within "insulated enclaves," tucked or hidden
in "small alcoves, recesses, and corners," "sheltered in the nooks and
crannies." Gamblers themselves confirm Friedman's insights. "I'd gravitate
toward the corners," Mollie remembered, "where it felt safe, and I
could get into my zone." Sharon would put her legs up on either side of
her machine, using her own body to delimit the boundaries of her personal
escape pod. "I don't like having my back exposed," said Daniel; "I
want to be in my own little cave."

"The element [players] most avoid when gambling," Friedman concludes,
"is expanse." Expanse comes in the form of "excess horizontal
space, excessive visible depth, and excess vertical space." An empty void
overhead, for example, "dissipates energy" and leaves individuals feeling
exposed and anxious. Friedman describes one property that failed to
eliminate space as "a completely open, free-spanned, high-ceilinged airplane
hangar." Another failed design presents patrons with "an enormous
sea of emptiness floating over endless rows of machines." To illustrate
the pitfalls of casinos' failure to eliminate space, he draws a representation
of the slot floor at Steve Wynn's Treasure Island, labeling it "the
state's most extensive uninterrupted ocean of slots" (see fig. 1.2, top). In
the drawing, a woman hesitates at the edge of the slot floor, clutching her
purse and looking apprehensively over her shoulder into the receding
depths of the casino, her body angled as if to retreat from the phalanx of
machines that seem "to extend, like the surface of the sea, into infinity."
This existentially unsettling spatial set-up, Friedman argues, neither invites
entry into the physical playing area nor into the experiential playing
zone that gamblers seek.

The Law of Space Elimination dictates that designers "constrict" space
to create protected sanctuaries for play. (Play itself Friedman describes
as "open," "undifferentiated," "boundless," "extensive," and "never-ending"—precisely
the phenomenological characteristics he strives to minimize
within the gambling environment.) One way to do this is by "segmenting"
the casino floor into compact areas isolated from the rest of the
casino and not visible to one another. Architectural elements such as
canopies, coffers, hoods, and soffits can be used to break up otherwise
cavernous space and provide a sense of enclosure and "perceptual shelter."
"Each cluster," writes Friedman, "perceptually surrounds the gambling
equipment beneath it. It has the quality of dropping imaginary lines
to connect with the equipment below. This psychologically separates the
area from the rest of the casino." As Venturi and his colleagues noted
earlier of casino interiors, "subspaces makes for privacy, protection, concentration
and control." Following this logic, the designers of the Mirage
built low-hanging tiki-hut covers throughout the casino floor as a way to
differentiate gaming areas and "create a feeling of intimacy in a 95,000
square foot space." As one of the chief architects explained to me in
1993: "The hanging huts give a smaller scale to the space, and people cluster
under low-scale things. From any one point in the casino you never
feel how big it is. What we really set out to do is control your perspective"
(see fig. 1.2, bottom).